Feature
The Gist
- Save time and money. AI can be a game-changing technology for marketing, helping to minimize manual labor and wasted campaign dollars, and enabling more advanced data analytics, content creation and customer experience enhancement.
- Improve performance. AI can be used to improve performance in email marketing, account-based marketing, and digital commerce and content marketing, by enabling easy product or content discovery, personalization and streamlining content creation.
- Efficiency and optimization. AI can also be utilized for operational efficiencies and optimization, including computer vision, AI-powered data-driven models and synthetic data, to augment scarce data, automate operational tasks and reduce bias, but it is important to prioritize data quality.
More than ever before, marketing is on the hook to drive the pipeline, both in volume and quality. This includes lead generation and acceleration through the funnel stages.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) can minimize redundancies, manual labor and wasted campaign dollars. Its potential applications reach from content creation to more advanced data analytics, including the generation of synthetic data sets.
"AI is a disruptive technology that has proven impact across marketing including content development, customer experience enhancement and the generation of synthetic data," said Nicole Greene, senior director, analyst, in the Gartner Marketing practice.
She explained there are multiple different strains of AI-based technologies, including generative AI, which creates content assets like text, images and video with results so compelling they’ve already gotten your attention.
"These technologies encompass both static content creation and chatbot-style dialogue," she said.
Content intelligence includes technologies like emotion AI, which can infer users’ emotional states using cameras and other sensors, and sentiment analysis, which extracts emotions from text.
"Computer vision involves capturing, processing and analyzing real-world images and videos to extract meaningful, contextual information from the physical world," Greene added.
A third type of AI is federated learning, which brings disparate sources of information together into a single executive function that optimizes multiple processes and touchpoints against an organization’s goals and values.
"This includes the essential step of reinforcement learning with human feedback," she noted.
Using AI to Improve Performance of Marketing Emails
AI-based profile segmentation with corresponding recommendation models have upped the relevance and performance of marketing emails.
Combining information from various sources, such as demographic data from a target list and additional LinkedIn contact information or company updates, can improve the overall impact of email campaigns. This broader context allows for a more effective and comprehensive approach.
For account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, use of AI can help determine most critical roles to engage with based on industry, region, segment, stage or technology adoption data.
To enhance real-time customer engagement, AI can be utilized to forecast the likelihood of a purchase and the amount to be spent. This information can then be utilized to target tailored promotions through emails or in-session messages.
Related Article: If You Want to Succeed With Artificial Intelligence in Marketing, Invest in People
Generative AI Content Creation and Production
Greene explained generative AI can generate content within the same modality (picture to picture) or across modalities (text to picture) and produce entirely unique artifacts or improve existing ones.
"Notably, OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 can create original images and art from a text description," she said.
Video can be generated to showcase event highlights, immersive product experiences and multilingual versions.
"AI tools can help write more content, leading to more campaigns, outreach and touchpoints. This is especially helpful when it comes to trying to build out iterative drip campaigns," said Splice Software CEO and founder Tara Kelly.
She explained by automating more and more of the content creation and writing process, AI tools have become imperative to keeping the customer journey moving and keeping customers engaged in the process.
Digital Commerce and Content Marketing
Human images can be generated for modeling. Images can be altered for different poses, aging and other features and customers can virtually try on makeup and outfits.
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Ads can be optimized by assembling content artifacts into combinations to support personalization, while avatars and virtual influencers can be used to engage customers on social media and in the metaverse, and to provide customer support.
"Text generators can be used to create marketing copy, news stories and job descriptions," Greene said. "Short form content like subject line creation can support A/B testing."
Kelly called ChatGPT a "game-changing" technology that can help marketers streamline their work.
"Its ability to streamline content creation will help marketers with outreach and customer preferences," she said. "As we move forward with future iterations of the tool, the more it deals with specifics the better it will be for marketing purposes as well."
AI can also enable easy discovery of products or content by auto-completion, typo-correction, auto-suggestion and true intent understanding of user search requests, questions or inquiries.
The situation involves users utilizing either precisely matching keywords or freely spoken natural language phrases.
Personalizing online product or content merchandising can also be enhanced through AI by ranking the most relevant results based on historical profile and item data as well as in session information.
Related Article: How AI Can Impact Your Marketing, Customer Experience
Tapping AI for Operational Efficiencies and Optimization
Greene said computer vision (CV) can be used to improve image quality, develop digital twins and create social avatars.
"The technology captures, processes and analyzes real-world images and videos to allow machines to extract meaningful and contextual information from the physical world," she explained. "It requires massive amounts of unstructured data to learn creatively."
Avatars and virtual influencers can be used to engage customers on social media and in the metaverse, and to provide customer support.
"Ads can be optimized by assembling content artifacts into combinations to support personalization," Greene noted.
AI-powered data-driven models can help marketers reduce having to spend time manually building rules, custom knowledge in the system.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can automate operational tasks by setting off alerts, sending emails and messages and initiating specific actions to be taken.
Employing AI to Augment Data and Resources
Greene pointed out synthetic data can augment scarce data, mitigate bias or preserve data privacy, noting generative AI for software coding can automate up to 70% of the programmers’ work.
"This frees up scarce IT resources for digital experience optimizations requested by business teams," she said. "Rapid improvements in generative modeling are reducing the need for training data, making the technology more accessible to marketing use cases especially among data-poor brands."
Kelly added AI-aided data analytics will continue to evolve to be faster and easier to use.
Nonetheless, the potential for bias to emerge at a quicker and more frequent rate may exist, necessitating the need to prioritize data quality, she cautioned.
AI-powered analytics tools can aid in microsegmenting target audiences based on key profile characteristics, determining their propensity to respond to messages, assessing buying intent using defined criteria applied to the target list, and evaluating the digital campaign performance through various A/B tests.
Through the use of AI, the purchaser can be directed to the most efficient channels to create enthusiasm and curiosity around particular product debuts or content.